Chapter 9: The Lobby

The lobby of Lakeline was two stories of glass and pale oak, with a security desk the size of a canoe.

My stepmother stood in the middle of it, wailing.

She wore black, as if for a funeral.

She was crying into a lace handkerchief with a noise that carried to the mezzanine.

My father stood beside her in his church coat, red-faced, holding a leather folder.

Fifteen people from three floors had found reasons to cross the lobby in the last ninety seconds.

The receptionist had given up pretending to type.

"There she is," my stepmother cried. "The girl who ruined her own sister's life!"

"Hello, Dad," I said.

"Where's your husband?" my father said.

"In New York."

"Then you'll call him." He opened the folder, his hands trembling with temper.

"We need to talk like a family, and the owner of this building is family now."

"What do you need?"

He glanced at the people on the mezzanine and lowered his voice, which carried anyway.

"I borrowed against the house for that wedding. Sixty-two thousand dollars.

"And now your sister has lost her apartment and every friend she had, in front of the whole parish."

"She was sleeping with my fiance."

"A mistake," my stepmother wailed. "A girl's mistake!"

"She's twenty-four."

"And you," my father went on, loudly, "have a husband worth hundreds of millions, and you can't help your own blood?

"Two hundred thousand clears the loan and puts Ottilie in a place of her own.

"Ask him. It's small change to a man like that."

The lobby was so quiet that I could hear the elevator cables.

I had spent twenty-six years waiting for that sentence, in one form or another.

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